A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Jill Lepore has a typically brilliant piece in this week’s New Yorker. It begins and ends as a review of recently published parenting memoirs by Michael Lewis and Ayelet Waldman, but it’s really about the fact that “the notion that parenthood is a distinct stage of life, shared by men and women, is historically in its infancy.” . . . David Lynch isn’t my ball of wax, but if he’s yours, Brian Slattery recommends Midnight Picnic by Nick Antosca (“part ghost story, part revenge story, except that the experience of reading it is less like either narrative and more like having a waking nightmare.”). . . . Two brief takes on a brief new bio of George Eliot: Ian Pindar asks why we haven’t started calling Eliot by her real name, Marian Evans; and Rhoda Koenig wonders whether Eliot’s “emphasis on moral instruction” will keep her work from being widely appreciated in the future. . . . David Oshinsky reads a new biography of I. F. Stone and wishes for a more nuanced view. . . . Two new novels owe a debt to Mary McCarthy’s The Group. How do they measure up to their inspiration?